Thursday, May 31, 2012

Hungarians Speaking Chinese

The Common Good might be for everyone to be free to compete
and grab as much as they can as their might and cleverness allows…

But this annoying wall between PC’s and Macs simply must stop.

I know, I know---I’m a philistine for pounding my hairy paws
hard on the right click button of the mouse for my pc. The Macs are sleeker. The whole experience a
sort of gated community for sound and vision epicureans. But I’m no high end aesthete, or am I? Not
really. Kind of. But hell…I like it easy and cheap, too.

I was a mac fiend for many years. But during the OS 9 into OS X era, when they
partitioned between the two operating systems, I felt annoyingly bifurcated. I
believe in LookBacks, forever. Plus, I had a lemon iMac that needed constant
patching. It did not work well with my peripherals (or with my profiteroles) no
matter how much gum and duct tape I applied.
So I walked (with the chiding of my easily-moseying-along-PC-clad- not-yet-husband). I walked away from mac about ten or eleven
years ago…

Of course, it followed me everywhere. At jobs. As iPhones. I
just shot this movie and you pretty much have to have a mac in post. And I mean it. One needs all those QuickTime
files to speak intelligently to the editor, composer, sound mixer, Jesus.

So this is what I did. I need to have my dailies easily
accessible for constant viewing. But the official external hard drive is mac
formatted, naturally, and large and precious and cannot be flying around and
certainly cannot be plugged into a PC for fear of being completely reformatted.
I bought a Seagate GoFlex that prides itself on being able to be read by Macs
and PC’s. One does stand in the aisles
of Best Buy and one often mutters, “Yeah, right.”

But I had to give it a shot.
A 1 Terabite drive for 100 bucks that can be read by both formats? YES!
Give me it! Problems solved for
maybe an eternity.

Home. Excitement. Plug and play you say? No such luck.

The mac (my cousin/God Son is here with his mac, so we are
rolling with that)---continued to see the Seagate as a read only. So you
couldn’t write to it. Then, often, the hard drive wouldn’t mount---meaning, an
icon for it would not show up. Though, if you went deep into utilities, you did
see that it was there. Unplugging and plugging it in sometimes would pull up an
icon. Using disk repair in utilities rendered it useful on the mac, but not on
the pc. War!

After much reformatting…wiping it out, reloading the
software onto the mac (its default really is PC), reloading the factory
software onto the external drive, rinse, repeat, plug and plug again…until
somehow, magically, both computers can read the drive…I was able to start my
copying.

And it is working.

But there is no way of knowing why it didn’t work right away.
There is the pain of the two systems attacking each other. And then, there’s
the middle pain of the Seagate who promises so much, an easy bi-platform
world—that totally did not work and had to be tinkered into reality to match
what it advertised. Fuck Seagate and its lying boxes.

Blech.

I think the future is in buying a Mac and having it run
windows, too. This way, you get it all.
(You can run windows on a mac. PC’s won’t run Mac OS at all.)

How are we feeling about a Chrome Operating system? I might be all for it. Blow up the dreaded PC/Mac war that has been
going on forever. Haven’t we experienced enough of those two little ego-boys
and their personal war?